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December 21, 2004
Remember Danger Mouse and Grey Tuesday? Brian Burton's Grey Album represented a daring "mash-up" of Jay-Z's The Black Album and the Beatles' eponymous 1969 work (popularly known as The White Album).
Dangermouse, The Grey Album.
We now have an article by Philip Gunderson in Postmodern Culture. Philip says:
"Grey Tuesday was an unqualified (and unauthorized) success. Disobedient consumers, who had not been given the option of purchasing the album through "legitimate" commercial channels, downloaded in excess of one million Grey Album tracks. Had it been available for purchase at a brick-and-mortar store, such numbers would have put the album firmly in Billboard's Top Ten."
The context is music fans being fed up with the high prices (and outright price-fixing) of commercially available music, opting to share music files via peer-to-peer file sharing networks. In response, record labels are attempting to coerce music fans back into the exchange relationship.
What then is the significance of this music consumer revolt around the Grey Album?
Philip Gunderson says:
" One could say that consumers have taken over the distribution of musical goods and services to the detriment of those who have heretofore controlled the means of musical production. The near-instantaneous, viral replication of information on a global network renders moot the legal formalities of trademark and copyright. The traditional radio station, with its fixed formats and mind-numbingly repetitive playlists, has been effectively displaced by technologies that allow music fans to specify what they want to hear and when they want to hear it."
Does this expess a mutation in the organisation of noise, in the nature of sounds and in the technology (a free exchange via MP3) that is used to order noise with sense and so make music? Is it a new mode of music that Jacques Attali talks about?
An interview with Jacques Attali, author of Noise: The Political Economy of Music
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shut up